Company History

Original plant location top floor at 1520 Washington Avenue in St. Louis, Missouri.

FiberLok's Roots: Headwear Business Spin-Off Westchester Hat Corporation, a national decorator and distributor of a general headwear product line, was founded in 1912 in St. Louis, Missouri, by P. M. Abrams Operations were continued until the late 1970s by his son H. J. Abrams and grandson Brown Abrams. A new division of the business, named St. Louis Hat, was formed to specialize in design, development and decoration of promotional (premium) headwear for customers like Anheuser Busch, G. Heileman Brewing, Cenex, Northrup King, Cargill, Monsanto Chemical and Ralston Purina.

Promotional Products Beginning
An important part of FiberLok's business was creating promotional golf or ball caps for brewery and "feed and seed" customers. In the promotional headwear business, there always was—and still is—an enormous need for competitive advantage: at the manufacturing level to win headwear sales, and at the user level to compete for brand exposure. It has always been important to come up with the style that consumers "must have" and an unique look offering maximum "bang for the buck" in promotional dollars

With this need in mind a sample of a flock heat transfer that came from the Far East was first presented to Brown Abrams in the spring of 1979. The fine detail, brilliant color, and rich three-dimensional texture of these early flock heat transfers presented a unique alternative way to embellish promotional headwear. This translated into a way for Westchester to gain competitive advantage in the promotional headwear market in the early eighties.

November 1979
A strategic partnership was developed with a foreign partner to supply flock heat transfers to Westchester Hat. Fiber Graphics, Inc., was incorporated in 1979 as the first and only American company established exclusively for the specialized manufacture and distribution of fiber graphics products. In the meantime, thanks to the introduction of flock heat transfer decoration into Westchester's headwear line, business boomed, confirming the demand for this new type of decoration.

January 1980
Brown Abrams executes exclusive American license agreement with Mr. Higashiguchi of Tokyo Houlaisha Company Ltd.; Abrams and Jim Henson (from Color Process Company in St. Louis) travel to Japan to learn the process for manufacture of flock heat transfers.

1985: High Voltage Graphics Founded
A new generation of flock heat transfer product was invented by Gerhard Arzberger and Brown Abrams and brand named Lextra¨, which combined flock heat transfer and multicolor direct flocking technologies. Patents were applied for world wide and a new international licensing business High Voltage Graphics, Inc., was incorporated.

March 1991
LextraPrint 3D Transfer process developed, patents applied for.

December 1992
LextraPrint products were first offered to the imprinting market in the late 1980s, and by 1992 FiberLok's growth was increasing dramatically and the company was beginning to outgrow its original location (loft space in a turn-of-the-century building in downtown St. Louis). At that time the decision was made to relocate the company to Fort Collins, Colorado, to both position the business for future growth as well as to take advantage of the environment . that offers higher quality-of-life options for its employees.

2001
LextraMax invented, patents applied for, production begins with 3,000,000-piece initial run.